Lords of Grass and Thunder (23 page)

Bekter met her eye and it seemed the world turned in that meeting.
This is the center of the storm
. The certainty welled up in him as though his heart was too full; dread chilled the sweat that trickled down his back under his clothes.
We thought the worst was over, but this is just the calm before the arms of chaos embrace us again.
The notion tied his guts in a queasy knot. Whatever was going to happen, the shamaness was part of it. And her apprentice, no doubt. If he were a different kind of man, he would have recommended that his father kill them both to protect the ulus. But he wasn’t, so he added a last coda to the story as a warning.

“At the wedding, Alaghai danced with her husband and her husband’s sons,” he said. “Each son kissed her on the cheek and called her ‘mother.’ But her brothers gave no blessings and her father wept.”

The children wouldn’t understand, hearing only the part of the story she had just told them. But the shamaness would know how history ended the tale. Warned that her plots had been found out, if such they were, he hoped that she might set aside the whirlwind.

“We’re finished here,” she told the children, rising and flapping her feathered sleeves at them. “I have work to do. Potions to mix, patients to see. This young man has waited long enough to have his needs tended.”

She waited until they had all run squealing with energy out into the rain. Then, settling the ruffled feathers of her robes, she turned her inquisitive, birdlike gaze on him.

“So, then, good sir. What can I do for you that the shaman who serves your own clan cannot give you?”

Poison,
he thought to ask,
an unfaithful lover
to probe the areas of her complicity against the khan. But he saw no guilt in the birdlike eyes that watched him, only a wry amusement. Young men wishing to keep their affairs secret had crept into her tent more than once, he figured, and from her expression guessed that they went away again no more satisfied than when they had come. Or at least, in the matter that had brought them. He’d seen that look on women’s faces when they gazed at the prince or even Qutula, but he’d never seen it turned on himself before. Not even in the beds he’d found his way to in his own sooty nights.

She made no offer, not that he would have accepted, but she left him rather at a loss for a moment.

“My name is Bekter.”

“The khan’s great poet! ‘The prince rode out, who all men call the Son of Light, Bright shining in his armor,’ ” she recited with a slight bow. “Your songs carry your reputation before you. I am Toragana, of little repute, but you must know that already.”

He blushed to hear his songs returning to him from this unlikely place, sufficiently flustered that the shamaness didn’t look too closely when he made no comment about her own identity. Mergen-Gur-Khan had charged him to find the girl, and he’d asked around for what he remembered—a tent with the sign of the raven above the door. In a more peaceful age those of whom he asked directions would have nodded amiably and given him her name and a story or two to go with it. But these were less trusting times; strangers had brought death into the Qubal city even before the gur-khan’s army had marched to war. So he had found her tent, but only now her name. Knowing that would give her the high ground between them, he was still trying to figure out what precarious ground they stood upon, so he let his expression answer while he posed his own excuse for being there.

“The gur-khan has charged me to make a history of the Qubal people. With your permission, I would listen to your stories and make them into songs for the court.” He hadn’t planned it but, being mostly true, it seemed as good a reason as any for spending time in the shamaness’ tent.

She looked at him as if he’d sprouted a second head. “I am familiar with Bolghai, who serves as shaman to the court,” she said. “He knows the story at least as well as I do. Better, I have no doubt. Why search out one as insignificant as I, when better is right at hand?”

“If you’re familiar with Bolghai, you shouldn’t need to ask!” He answered her wry smile with an effort at the sexy grin Qutula seemed to manage so easily. “His face is far less fair, his form less interesting, and—”

“His smell is certainly not appealing,” she said with a laugh. She didn’t take his foolishness seriously, but it had distracted her from his deception.

“May I come again? Tomorrow, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble?”

“The day after,” she suggested instead. “I have heard that we move camp again tomorrow.”

He opened his mouth to offer his help in packing but closed it again. He had Sechule to consider, and when the court moved every hand took guard duty, even Bekter. “The day after, then,” he agreed with the slight bow proper when asking a favor from one of ambiguous status. Her position as shamaness gave her rank that her lowly clan took away again.

“Ask for Toragana,” she told him. “Anyone in these parts will know where to find me.”

She watched him as he bowed himself out, imagining his strong, sure fingers playing the lute for the khan’s court. Other uses for those fingers came to her, but she put those thoughts aside. She had no question that Bekter’s sudden appearance bore more on Eluneke’s visions than her own personal charms or storytelling ability. “ ‘Bright shining one’ indeed,” she mused. “I wonder if you realize all that you have done with your song?”

But he was gone, and until she knew more about him, she wouldn’t have asked it anyway.

Chapter Fifteen

S
OMETHING WAS GOING ON between General Yesugei and his uncle. He’d been thinking about the problem ever since Mergen sent the general to hold the grasslands of the Uulgar clans in his name. Tayy figured it wasn’t exactly an argument yet, but it was enough to put him on his guard. From the dais he took a quick look around him. Yesugei’s absence left a gap in the gur-khan’s defenses not easily filled. Politics had a part in it, for one thing. Mergen had named Yesugei khan in his place among the Uulgar and had taken the title of gur-khan—khan of khans—for himself.

That the general wasn’t happier about his sweeping change in fortunes had a lot to do with Sechule, Mergen’s poorly-kept secret since before the prince or his cousins were born. If wealth and distance didn’t mend the breach, Tayy feared the gur-khan might be compelled to end it more permanently—and to his sorrow—with an execution. Before the war he would not have credited it, but Mergen had lately proved himself in delivering swift and deadly justice against his enemies. He hoped General Yesugei saw as much and tempered his love with caution.

Beside him on the dais, Qutula handed Tayy a meat pie with one bite missing. He accepted absently, grown used to his cousin tasting his food. When he bit into the pie, the richness of sheep fat exploded pleasantly in his mouth. He took a moment to savor it as thoughts about his elders tumbled in his head.

For Mergen’s sake, and because her sons Qutula and Bekter had been among his first childhood companions, he tried to like his uncle’s former—probably—mistress. She was pretty enough for somebody that old, but she had a way of watching him when she thought he didn’t see it that unnerved him. Sechule always seemed to be counting up the pebbles on the board and she was never happy about the sum. He figured to stay out of her way. Licking his fingers, he decided that if his elders didn’t have the sense to do the same they deserved their broken hearts. They were too old to be chasing women anyway.

Sechule wasn’t the only bad match on his mind, however. The khan’s tent city, much reduced from the size it had grown to during the war, had set up on the plains. As always, the khan’s city followed the Onga, but here the river disappeared into a little dell. When last they had set up camp in this place, the emerald green bamboo snake-demon, masquerading as his father’s second wife, had murdered Chimbai-Khan in his bed. Tayy planned to visit the shrine where his father’s pyre had burned and make an offering of his own to the ancestral spirit. He thought he’d kept his intentions to himself, but his grandmother had been reading his heart since he was on leading reins. It didn’t surprise him that she anticipated him now.

“Give this to my son among the spirits for me,” Bortu told him, and put a pie into his hands.

“I will.” He wrapped the gift in a clean bit of red silk, his own offering, and tucked it in the pocket of his lightweight yellow court coat embroidered from the upturned silver toes of his boots to his throat with the symbols of earth and sky and water. “If I have your permission?” He bowed deeply to his uncle the gur-khan, who gave it with a nod, his own sorrowful memories clear in his eyes.

“Give my brother a good account of me,” Mergen asked, to which Tayy gave a second bow.

“Always,” he promised. Then he kissed his grandmother respectfully first on one cheek and then on the other.

Qutula followed him from the dais. On the way past the firebox they picked up Bekter and Mangkut and others of his cadre on duty in the ger-tent palace. Together they headed for the door, where Altan waited with the dogs and the horses. Jumal had gone south as a captain in Yesugei-Khan’s army to claim the Uulgar clans in the name of the gur-khan. The tents of his clans had gone with him, counting the young captain’s rise in fortunes as their own.

They were gone, and Altan was already having trouble with the dogs. Tayy gave his friend a companionable nod over the heads of the hounds who snugged their bodies up close on either side of him and snarled to remind Qutula of their dislike. The dogs made his mare nervous and she kept her distance, stamping her foot and shaking the bristles of her mane in her impatience to be going.

“Enough, both of you!” With a vigorous rub to remind them of his affection, Tayy settled the dogs with a sharp command and whistled for the mare. When his guardsmen would have mounted their own horses to join him, he put a hand on Qutula’s shoulder, to keep him on his feet. His cousin flared his nostrils, perhaps seeing in the gesture too much of the same command that had put the dogs in their place. He didn’t mean it that way.

“Not today,” he said, and gave Qutula’s shoulder a companionable squeeze to show that there was no rift between them. “This is something I have to do alone.”

“Your uncle won’t approve,” Bekter objected, though Tayy knew this cousin would rather compose songs with the court musicians than ride with the warriors. “We have the khan’s orders to protect you.”

“Protect me from what? We are in our own lands, our enemies to the north have become our allies and our enemies to the south answer to the khan through his general.”

“Accidents—” In Duwa’s mouth, it sounded like a suggestion more than a warning, but Tayy dismissed this excuse as well.

“Which you can’t prevent if they are to happen.”

“There may be poisonous snakes in the grass,” Qutula suggested, a painful reminder of how Chimbai-Khan had died. He seemed unaware that his hand rubbed at his breast in the very place where Tayy had seen the emerald-green tattoo come to snaky life.

The gesture troubled the prince. His cousin had called the mark a reminder, but Tayy had felt the bruises of Qutula’s thumbs for days after they wrestled for the khan. Try as he might to believe in his guardsman, suspicion, like a worm, had crawled into his heart and slowly ate away at his trust.

“I’ll make plenty of noise to warn away the natural vipers,” he said. “As for the unnatural kind, the one I am thinking of had too much love of luxury to remain long in the grass. The Lady Chaiujin is long gone, off to steal the life of some less suspicious victim, I am sure.”

At the mention of the serpent-demon the dogs took up their baying, demonstrating with their voices a will to defend their master.

“Of course.” Qutula stepped away from the snarling dogs. He let his hand fall, but it seemed to take some effort to keep it at his side.

Tayy guided his mount toward the open grass. “If I don’t come back, you’ll know where to look—” The last time he’d ridden off on his own, he’d been kidnapped by pirates and set to the oar as a slave. The Marmer Sea was far from here, however, and the Qubal tent city well guarded by the khan’s army.

“But nothing is going to happen. I expect to find you waiting here for me when I get back—we’ll want a full accounting of this woman of yours. What we don’t have ourselves, we must enjoy at secondhand!”

He had thought to lighten the tension with his gentle teasing but a furtive glance passed over Qutula’s face, quickly gone again for a bland smile.

“And how long would I find myself welcome in any lady’s bed if word of my visits should find their way into the camp?” A lifted eyebrow promised voluptuous secrets remaining unspoken.

Qutula hadn’t mentioned her in days, and Tayy wondered if that promise was all bluff. Perhaps his cousin no longer sneaked under the tent cloths of his mystery lady. Having a few secrets of his own he felt uncomfortable pressing the point so publicly. But secrets made excellent trade goods in private. “I think you’re afraid that one of us will steal her away from you,” he countered. “When I return, perhaps we can find something more interesting to wager on than ’Tula’s love life.”